How To Fill The Rectangle Tool In In Design

This tutorial walks through how to add color backgrounds and shapes to an InDesign poster.

Adding a Color Background

Once your poster is created, you may want to start by creating a colored shape for your background.

Select the Rectangle tool from the tool panel. The Rectangle tool's icon is a shaded rectangle and is the sixth from the top on the left.

Click-and drag to create a shape approximately the size of your poster.

You can make it bigger than your poster to make sure you cover the whole thing, and the excess will be cropped off when you export your poster.

Your rectangle will default to not having any fill color. Add color to it from the Swatches panel which can be accessed from the buttons to the right of your poster layout,

If you do not see the toolbar, refer to the Starting an InDesign tutorial for interface set up instructions.

Select the basic version of the color you want your background to be.

We chose yellow because the topic of our poster is THON.

Adjust the shade and tone of your color by double-clicking the fill selection indicator, found at the bottom of the tools panel.

The Color Picker window will open.

For a more familiar color space selection, click the radio button next to the "L:" towards the bottom of the window.

To make a light yellow, we dragged the slider up and dragged the cross-hairs towards the center of the Color Space.

Hit the "OK" button in the Color Picker window to confirm the new color.

Save your work by selecting Save in the file menu (ctrl/cmd + s on the keyboard).

save indesign file image

Adding Color Shapes

The same tool and process is used for creating additional color elements for your poster.

Select the Rectangle tool if it's not already selected and click-and-drag to make the shape you want.

drag shape image

For our poster, we wanted to create a white background for where our text will go in the first column, and used the guides to determine the shape.

Access the swatches from the buttons to the right of your poster and select the color you want.

open swatches image
We selected Paper to get a white shape.

To make a matching shape on the other side of your poster, hold down option/alt on your keyboard to get the Duplicate tool.

duplicate tool image

Click-and drag a copy of your shape to the position you want on the poster.

duplicated shape image

Save your work by selecting Save in the file menu (ctrl/cmd + s on the keyboard).

save indesign file image

Return to InDesign tutorials